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Practice Persistence

The most recent chapter in my continuing reading of The Obstacle is the Way is all about persistence and, to be honest, it’s exactly what you’d think.

The chapter starts with Ryan Holiday relating a story of General Ulysses S. Grant besieging Vicksburg. Challenges are enumerated, obstacles recounted. Distractions are mentioned. And, do you know what? Grant takes the town in the end, proving all the naysayers wrong.

The next story is of Thomas Edison inventing the lightbulb. You know that story, but it does include a cameo from Nikola Tesla, which seems worth recounting:

Nikola Tesla, who spent a fustrated year in Edison’s lab during the invention of the lightbulb, once sneered that if Edison needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would “proceed at once” to simply “examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.”

The fact that that paragraph ends with “Well, sometimes that’s exactly the right method” pretty much sums up the whole message: get ready to work hard.

You can probably tell I’m a little sarcastic about the whole thing, partly because it seems cliché and partly because it seems like bad advice. (Some obstacles just won’t be overcome — you’re not going to head-butt your way through a concrete wall.)

However, later in the chapter, there is this paragraph:

Once you start attacking an obstacle, quitting is not an option. It cannot enter your head. Abandoning one path for another that might be more promising? Sure, but that’s a far cry from giving up. Once you can envision yourself quitting altogethr, you might as well ring the bell. It’s done.

I find that paragraph to be the most valuable of all that is in the chapter.

I guess that “work harder, not smarter” doesn’t seem like great advice. And, the “examine every straw” seems like the worst way to find a needle in a haystack. In fact, I think that we’re under an obligation to make the most out of the time that we have, and I think that if a certain approach isn’t yielding results, you have to start looking for the one that will.

(In an unrelated note, I seem to be happy to consider jumping between projects.)

I get the idea that you can’t give up too early, but I certainly think it’s just as wrong to never give up. Maintain the original objective, but be willing to rethink how you’ll get there.

More than simply saying “practice persistence,” I think it’s valuable to gain some insight into what kind of things you get better at with persistence (and what kinds of things just don’t get better, not matter how much you try and try) and how to benchmark, even informally, whether or not you’re making progress or just spinning your wheels.

So, my takeaway from this chapter is this: be persistent, but be willing to change what you’re being persistent at.